DR. EDDA L. FIELDS-BLACK, PH.D., a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center. A descendant of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, South Carolina, and a USCT soldier (her great-great-great grandfather) from Beaufort County who fought in the Combahee River Raid in June 1863, she has written extensively about the transnational history of West African rice farmers. She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She consulted for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s permanent exhibition, “Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina.” She is also the executive producer and librettist of Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice, a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass. Her book, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press), has been named winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History; the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Institute Lincoln Prize; the Society of Civil War Historians 2025 Tom Watson Brown Award; the South Carolina Historical Society 2024 George C. Rogers Jr. Award; and the Association for Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society’s 2024 Marsha M. Greenlee History Award. In addition, Combee was also named to several best-of lists in 2024, including by The New Yorker.
